


Trust Issues

by WritingsOfStardust



Category: Firefly
Genre: 2k, Character Study, Gen, What-If
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-16
Updated: 2020-07-16
Packaged: 2021-03-05 02:47:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,072
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25317031
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WritingsOfStardust/pseuds/WritingsOfStardust
Summary: You are Serenity's newest passenger, and all the slow travel between rim planets gives you plenty of time to think about the baggage each of your fellow drifters are carrying.
Kudos: 5





	Trust Issues

Most everyone on the firefly-class transport ship Serenity had an issue with their level of trust in some way, shape, or form. You’d been on board for almost two months, an aimless passenger, in a sort of limbo between guest and crew. And while most days this position in purgatory left you in an uncomfortable field, an outsider, an _other_ , there were some days when you appreciated the distance you had from Serenity’s crew. You could see more objectively and better scrutinize the people who prepared your food and knew where you slept.

(Maybe that itching need to scrutinize and analyze meant you had an issue with trust, too.)

Everyone took their cues from Captain Malcolm Reynolds, yourself included. It was his ship – listening to him was just the decent thing to do, as a guest. As a crew. You found that Mal wasn’t just a captain, but a protector, though he would never say that himself. Something else he had never said – at least, not to you – was that he was a former soldier. You recognized the signs from people who had returned home from the Unification War, especially on the losing side. Hypervigilance, guardedness, a need for control. Mal masked these fairly well; it took you a few days to see them for what they were.

What took you no time at all to see was how suspiciously he eyed you. He was nothing but friendly and hospitable, but it took a few days for him to stop looking at you like you might’ve been a spy. He looked at everyone who wasn’t a crew member like that. He didn’t trust people easily, and he didn’t fully trust even some of his crew. For a soldier, maybe that was healthy in the sense of keeping oneself alive. For a regular man who wasn’t fighting in any wars any longer, you knew it wasn’t. There would be a day when his crew would disband. Then how would Mal get by, without anyone he trusted enough to make allegiances?

Once you figured it out about Mal, that he had been a browncoat, it was easy to figure it out about Zoë. Zoë’s composure was unflappable. You envied her that. The woman was strong enough that you were far more scared of her than you were of Jayne, especially because where Jayne was a force of muscle, Zoë was as strong in the head as she was in a fight. She had a sharp brain and a balanced temperament that helped to keep Mal in check. They complemented each other. It made sense that she was his right-hand. But she still carried herself tall and started every survey of a new place the same: by looking for defendable points and an exit strategy, just in case. It was the same hypervigilance, guardedness, and need for control that the captain had. Zoë just did it all with less noise and more subtlety.

Trust issues, issues feeling safe, issues having faith in the general public – none of those surprised you, coming from soldiers. Especially not those who had fought the Alliance. You told them, you were smart enough never to have crossed them and fortunate enough that you had nothing they wanted, so the central planets’ government didn’t give a rat’s ass who you were or what you did, long as you stayed out of their way, but you weren’t so blind that you swallowed down all the propaganda they published, either. Trusting strangers wasn’t so smart if you had given the Alliance a reason to hunt you down. Given all the politics tangled up in warfare, Mal and Zoë were smart to be wary.

Closest to Zoë, and next most integral to the crew, tactically speaking, was her husband, the pilot, whose first name you still didn’t know; a sarcastic, witty, playful man who treated everything with levity except his wife and the ship, whom he treated like a royal and like a baby, respectively. Wash had the confidence of everyone on the ship, probably because he was smart not to take sides where it could be avoided. Like his wife tempered his captain, Wash tempered Zoë in terms of trust and openness. Wash had more patience and more willingness to learn the story behind others’ actions. He trusted that people, as a general rule, weren’t evil, but he wasn’t so naïve as to assume everyone told the truth.

Healthy. That was the word. Wash was healthy and well-adjusted, probably the best of all of them aboard. Zoë was very careful with her husband, never infantilizing but always protecting him, and Wash, to his credit, understood where he was in the pecking order and why he was there. He didn’t fight. This meant that, though he might have been more willing to extend trust, he didn’t usually get to have a voice in making those judgment calls, because he was tending to the ship while other members of the crew were handling business.

Next was the mechanic. You were convinced Kaylee was the sole reason an old ship like Serenity was still in the sky at all. Kaylee was the youngest of all the working crew, at twenty but with the intuition and skill of an engineer in her forties. Everyone looked out for Kaylee. The girl didn’t seem to have a single mean bone in her body, not even one of the tiny ones in her hands or feet, and was endlessly cheerful to boot. At first, you had thought she was a little bit dense. Time and interaction with her had you coming around. Kaylee wasn’t dense, she was just an optimist. She saw the folks around her were always planning to see the worst in people, and she took it upon herself to see the good. That took inner strength and faith – faith in what, you weren’t sure, but faith nonetheless.

That optimism, though – that desire to always see someone’s potential, and never their dark side – that was not what you’d call healthy. Even in the central planets, people knew to watch their own backs, though it was done surreptitiously beneath veneers of politeness and diplomacy. On the rim planets, a girl like Kaylee could get taken advantage of in a heartbeat, which, you suspected, was why no one ever let her go off alone when Serenity was seated on a planet’s crust. It was as much about protecting their mechanic as it was about protecting the naïve do-gooder. If Kaylee stayed in the black long enough, she would have to become more cynical. You were sure it would wear off on her, even if she didn’t consciously learn it herself.

The last of the working crew ensemble was Jayne, the mercenary from Beylix, an uneducated, possibly illiterate hick with an eye for women and money. He perpetuated the stereotypes against his own planet, but it was never worth pointing out, because you doubted he would know what a stereotype was. Being uneducated and illiterate didn’t make someone stupid, and Jayne wouldn’t still be alive if he were a complete idiot, but he lacked book smarts in a glaringly obvious way that got him into a number of spats with Simon – but the doctor was a different story.

Jayne trusted no one, except, perhaps, Mal, to whom he owed safety, shelter, and support, and Kaylee, who Jayne considered too naïve and trusting to pose a threat at all. Anyone who came too close, he would either report to the captain or take care of himself with his own personal arsenal. He was cooperative with the crew, but always had a mind looking out for his own best interests. He wasn’t evil, just simple. Nothing was wrong with simple. It was comforting to you that someone so transparent was on the list. It was one less person to analyze quite so closely.

Inara… An unofficial crew member, but a part of the family, all the same. Her close bonds with Kaylee were obvious and though Mal was constantly offending her, he obviously cared a great deal. Companions were not strangers to you. You understood that her levels of trust were tiered, by necessity, and while tiered systems were often well-adjusted, that of a Companion was not necessarily healthy. Survivable, durable, practical, and profitable, yes, all of those for certain – but you had seen her defend herself, and there was no way she went to a stranger who called for a high-society prostitute with complete trust.

Inara was a valuable part of Serenity, but she, like Wash, was never put in positions to make judgment calls about business, because her business was distinctly separate from that of the rest of the ship’s. You still weren’t completely sure how the arrangement came to be or what the finer points were. Ultimately, you couldn’t conceive that her trust in others was fully balanced, but you also knew that any issues she had were not influencing the rest of the crew, simply because Inara had some level of explicit trust in Mal – not necessarily to tell the truth, but not to let any harm come onto herself or anyone else under (or in) Serenity’s wings.

Inara may have occupied a grey space between crew and guest, but her space was not as undefined and hazy as yours, because she didn’t need a title. She was simply Inara, welcome and wanted on board, just as any of the others were. Through following her lead, you had seen the actual guests, those who completed chores and rendered services or outright paid for an indefinite period of shelter, carve out spaces for themselves and find a niche.

Shepherd Book didn’t practice what he preached. It wasn’t a good look on him, but then, you were cynical from the start. You’d never met a fully honest preacher before and didn’t expect to now. He looked for good in people and talked of forgiveness, but there was a dark side to him, secrets he had no intention of spilling and information a godly shepherd had no reason for having. Perhaps he had good will, and you didn’t feel like he were a threat, but you didn’t trust him and you doubted that he fully trusted anyone. After all, if he did trust in full, then someone would know why he sought passage on Serenity in the first place.

Simon, resident doctor, gave up a cushy life where he didn’t need to be wary of others. His privilege gave him all kinds of layers upon layers of protection from the unsavory sort. The transition to a fugitive immersed him suddenly into a ‘verse where if he didn’t think carefully and evaluate others correctly, he and his sister could end up dead (or worse). You didn’t need to observe his careful toeing around the others to think he had some trust issues. Everything he had ever thought about the Alliance had been proven wrong when they harmed his little sister, his parents had not helped him to protect her, and he lost everything else he had all at once. He would have to be as disconnected as his sister _not_ to be untrusting. Maybe that would change with time, but the future wasn’t relevant.

River Tam. How could you assess how much she trusted, when she was capable of precisely evaluating character? Trust was about making blind assumptions and either assigning or denying the benefit of the doubt. River never needed to have doubts. The Academy may have taken away much from her, but they had given her a priceless psychic skill. You were sure she and her brother didn’t see it that way. You understood their perspective, especially when you heard her screaming in a fit of trauma- and lobotomy-induced psychosis.

For your intents and purposes, River Tam would not be trusting. She would see right through any ruse.

Most everyone on Serenity had a trust issue or two. They were right to.

_Broadcast Wave_

_Time Sent: 2247 hrs, 10/03/2517._

_Target: River Tam, alive. Simon Tam, dead or alive._

_The fugitives are located. River Tam may be retrieved. Covert operation required. Contact point on Persephone._

_Mark: Kaylee Frye - most viable point of access. She trusts me. If I can isolate her away from the captain, I can stage a rendezvous and convince her to let plainclothes onto the ship where the fugitives are hiding._

_Officer Y/N Y/L/N._

**Author's Note:**

> I would've liked to see what might have happened if the Alliance were willing to be more patient and manipulative in their search of the Tams, and so this idea was born. 
> 
> This is the first Firefly fic I have written. I welcome constructive criticism and tips for writing with these characters.


End file.
